Page 87 of Ghosted By Texas

“I’m taking you home.”

“But I thought…”

“Nothing has changed between us, Jordan. I meant what I said before about not doing the friends with benefits thing. It won’t work for us, especially since you never date anyone else. We do still need time apart for you to go date and try to find someone who makes you happy.”

“You are the person who makes me happy, Austin!”

“No, I don’t. You can’t be happy with the fact that things are basically over with my girlfriend and you being here in front of me, wearing almost nothing, has had no effect on me. You can’t be happy with someone who doesn’t have anything more than friendly feelings for you.”

“You only think that because you’re still rebelling against what our parents want.”

“Jordan, stop. I’m taking you home and that’s the end of it. We are just friends. Nothing more. That isn’t going to change.”

Not even after Becs stomped on my heart and hurt me in a way I’d never been hurt before. I didn’t tell my best friend that part, because it wasn’t something I was willing to admit out loud just yet.

Go back to Chapter 6

Becs was in my bed, in the house I’d built for my future family, after admitting that our date tonight had been the best night of her life. She drifted off to sleep more than an hour ago in my arms, but I wasn’t able to follow her, despite how exhausted I felt. Having her here, for the first time, felt too precious somehow and I didn’t want to miss a second of her warm body lying next to mine, in the bed that would one day be ours.

The Van Gough exhibit wasn’t something that normally would have ranked as one of the best moments of my life but watching the excitement in her eyes and feeling like we were being immersed in her world, made all the difference.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat to keep my woman satisfied. The night had gone off without a hitch, the same as the past two weeks. If it hadn’t been for my sister jumping my ass the day before about Jordan, I’d say the past two weeks had been perfection.

My best friend was still a touchy issue that I didn’t know how to work around. Jordan wasn’t happy with me basically disappearing from her life again as I tried to work on my relationship with Becs. It couldn’t be helped though, after everything that went on in our pasts, I was lucky my girlfriend even allowed this opportunity for a second, or was it third, chance.

Still, it didn’t feel fair to Jordan because, as my sister pointed out, she didn’t do anything wrong to get the shaft from me. I wondered if I’d be able to reintroduce Jordan to our lives over the next couple weeks, in the hopes of settling everyone in with the reality that I was dating Becs and Jordan was still my close friend.

I’d asked Jordan about the things Becs accused her of, like meeting her on campus two weeks after we broke up to rub it in her face that Jordan and I were fucking again. She claimed it never happened. I had a hard time figuring out who was lying and who was telling the truth because I didn’t think Jordan would do anything to impede my happiness, even if she did think she had a crush on me.

Then again, how else could Becs have known some of the things Jordan supposedly told her? I didn’t think Becs would purposely try to remove Jordan from my life, but there was a tiny bit of doubt that went both ways. Both women thought the other was trying to keep me from them. It meant they each had their own motivation.

I tried to ask my dad, the week before, what he thought I should do about everything. His advice had been vague.

“Son, you have to figure out what, or who in this case, is the most important to you and focus on that part of your life. It’s going to require sacrifice on your part. If you’re lucky, you get to keep them both. If you’re not, you have to choose who you want around more.”

“That’s not fair,” I’d told him because there wasn’t a world where I could imagine not having either of them. I’d already lived in a world where Becs was no longer part of my life and it had sucked. Aside from a couple weeks, where we’d been apart when I first started seriously dating Becs years ago, and the past two weeks where I’d barely seen my best friend, Jordan had always been in my life. How could I even wrap my head around her not being there in the future?

“This is one of those times when you have to realize life is rarely fair, it’s just a series of choices we have to make on the path to contentment.”

“Contentment?” I scoffed.

“Contentment,” he agreed with a huff of his own. “You can’t feel happiness, or even elation, without experiencing the opposite emotion. Just like you can’t know love without hate. It’s how the universe balances itself. Contentment is the middle of the road, that place between the extremes where we reside more of the time than not.”

“Then what’s the opposite of contentment?”

“From the way you talk, it’s been the past six years that you lived without your woman by your side. It’s the moderate level of misery you carry with you when you know you somehow ended up traveling down the wrong path. Contentment is the place in your life where you know you found your path and you can breathe easily again.”

In a weird way, my father’s explanation made a lot of sense. I couldn’t lose Becs again, because he was right, there was a sense of wrongness that followed me around for years, like I was forgetting something important when I knew everything was in order. Everything except the fact that she had been missing from my life.

“Won’t I just be trading one misery for another if I have to choose between them?”

“How should I know?” My father asked. “I’m a simple man, Austin. I believe that if your heart needs something, you have to act. Need and want are two different things. You need one of those women in your life. I have a feeling you just want the other one there because it’s a comfortable choice to make, not necessarily because she does anything to better your life.”

“Which one are you talking about?”

My father smiled at me and then winked like a fucking lunatic. “That’s what you need to figure out.”

While his answers had been insightful, his lack of clarity just made more of a headache for me. If the last two weeks were anything to go by, Becs was the woman I needed. Not that I didn’t already know that, but it had taken a while for me to understand. Even though Jordan had been my friend since we were kids, I didn’t need her. In a lot of ways, she held me back from experiencing true happiness. I was always more worried about how she would react or feel than doing what I truly wanted. Then there was the worry that the next decision I made might unravel the shitty framework that was our friendship.

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